TikTok Just Banned Every Peptide Search Term | Weekly Q&A #18

There are 1,000 micrograms in one milligram, and that single fact is the reason most people dosing peptides at home are either wasting money or taking ten times what they think they are. So I want to walk the whole math, from vial to syringe, the same way I would if you were standing in my kitchen holding the thing.

But before the math, the system it sits inside, because a dose means nothing if you do not understand what you are dosing and why.

So I still have another 160 or so questions from our rapid fire Q&A printout that we did from our school groups, and a huge chunk of them come back to the same thing, which is people wanting a yes or no answer to a question that has five variables sitting underneath it.

A great example is how I did it with the testosterone, right? Like what's the decision tree for whether or not I should do TRT? Well, let me explain to you the way that your body produces testosterone, how it works, what red flags we're looking for, where we could fall short in the production chain, and then help you to understand what things influence that, then from there you can make a decision that best fits your situation rather than me just saying if you have secondary hypogonadism you don't need TRT, if you have primary hypogonadism you need TRT, go.

The chain starts in the hypothalamus, which is the part of your brain that releases something called GnRH, which is the signal that tells the pituitary gland to act. The pituitary then releases LH and FSH, which are the two hormones that travel down to the testicles and tell them to produce testosterone.

After your testicles produce testosterone, through aromatase, some of that is converted into estrogen or estradiol and through 5-alpha reductase, which is another enzyme, you produce DHT. DHT is a hormone that's responsible for what will say all of the masculine benefits that come from testosterone and estradiol is responsible for all of the, we'll say, body-protectant cognitive things related to testosterone, okay? That conversion of estradiol is what creates a natural feedback at the hypothalamus.

That feedback loop is the part people skip. Your brain is not measuring testosterone to decide whether to keep producing it, it is reading estradiol, and the enzyme doing that conversion lives heavily in fat tissue, which is why body composition changes the whole equation. Longcope and colleagues measured this directly in 1978 and found that adipose tissue is a meaningful site of that conversion, which is the mechanical reason a heavier man converts more.

So when your labs come back low, the question is where in that chain it broke. If testosterone is low and LH and FSH are low or sitting in a normal range, the signal from upstream is the problem, and that is secondary hypogonadism.

So this would be your diet, your nutrition, your pituitary is not responding because you're not giving your body enough resources or fuel to actually feel like it needs to do that thing or actually convert that, or a combination of two, which is your overweight.

Primary is the other shape of the same lab panel. Testosterone low, LH and FSH normal or very high, which means the brain is screaming and the testicles are not answering, and no amount of sleep correction is going to fix a factory that cannot run.

For secondary, fix the lifestyle, add D3 with K2, zinc and magnesium, run that for 90 days and check for meaningful improvements before you touch anything exogenous. The reason I push that window is that once you start exogenous testosterone, the longer you stay on without breaks, the harder it becomes to get your natural system to turn back on, and most people end up treating TRT as a lifetime decision whether they planned to or not.

Now the math, because this is where people actually get hurt.

The conversion to milligrams is 1,000 milligrams, and that's equal to one gram. When you get your retitrutide, little vial, and it says there are 10 milligrams in that, you're looking at 10,000 micrograms sitting in that same vial.

A standard insulin syringe holds 100 units, and 100 units equals one cc, and one cc is one milliliter. So 10 units is one tenth of a milliliter. Those are the only two numbers you have to memorize.

What we're going to do is we're going to take our bacteriostatic water, which is this big container that has 10 milliliters in it, and we add some measured amount of it to the powder, and whatever amount we add is what sets the concentration. The powder stays exactly as it is no matter what you pour in, and the water is the only variable doing any work here.

In this case, I know that if I have 10 milligrams peptide, sorry, and I add one milliliter of water in it, now I have this nice little mixture in here that's 10 milligrams per milliliter, So therefore, there are 100 units, right, one milliliter, 100 units, equals 10 milligrams. Therefore, if I pull 50 units, I have what, five milligrams. If I pull 10 units, I have what, one milligram.

If the mixture looks dense or you see floaters, add two milliliters instead, and now that same 10 milligrams is spread across 200 units, which is five milligrams per milliliter. A two milligram dose that used to be 20 units is now 40 units, and the dose in your body did not change at all.

The same ratio holds for ipamorelin, just with different starting numbers. A five milligram vial with two milliliters of water gives you 2.5 milligrams per milliliter.

So again, going over here, 200 units or two milliliters equals five milligrams, right? So if we do 100 units, that's 2.5, 50 units gets you 1.25, and 10 units gets you 250 micrograms.

Testosterone is simpler because it arrives already mixed. And there are 10 milliliters in this vial, that's what it'll say on it. So we, or it'll even say 2,000 milligrams. So I know in this container there's, we have our testosterone, which is this solid powder that they mixed into oil at 200 milligrams per milliliter.

So that means if I do a half a milliliter, or 50 units, that equals 100 milligrams. If I do 10 units with that concentration, that's 10 milligrams per 10 units.

So that means if we're doing 100 milligrams a week, and we're doing that into three injections per week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I know that that's 50 units divided by 3, which is 16.6666 units per shot.

If I'm doing 200 milligrams per week, and I'm doing 5 injections, Monday through Friday, that's 1 milliliter, or 100 units, divided by 5. In this case, that's 20 units per injection.

More injections at smaller amounts keeps levels more stable, which matters because the peaks are what drive the side effects, and the main side effect people chase with a drug they should not be taking is high estradiol.

You should not need an aromatase inhibitor if you are on TRT. If your E2 is high it is almost always because your dose is too high, or because you are carrying enough body fat that you are giving your body more fuel for the fire. Longcope's 2001 review laid out how much of circulating estradiol in men comes from peripheral conversion rather than direct secretion, which is why dose and body fat are the two levers.

Most of the time the side effects that we'll experience from high E2 are how we feel, how's your mood, are you turning into a whiny little bitch who's emotional, that's the first thing.

The second thing is much easier to kind of pick up on, especially if you're already a whiny little bitch, like most of you, just kidding, kind of, is do you experience extreme sensitivity in the nipples? If you start to experience nipple sensitivity, that's the first indication that you have high E2.

Let that run and you get residual hardness behind the nipple, a hard knot you can feel. The fix is the dose, not an aromatase inhibitor. The use of an AI has just as much, if not a greater negative impact on your body than smoking cigarettes does.

There is a lot more of this inside the free community, and it is genuinely free, so if you want somewhere to ask the follow-up question the men's group is here: https://www.skool.com/jh-iron-forge-brotherhood/about

Research: Longcope 1978 (PMID: 752017); Longcope 2001 (PMID: 11223379); Pickart 2012 (PMID: 22666519); Longland 2016 (PMID: 26817506); Mettler 2010 (PMID: 19927027).

References

Bhasin et al., Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2018. PMID: 29562364. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29562364/

Longcope et al., Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 1978. PMID: 752017. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/752017/

Longcope, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism, 2001. PMID: 11223379. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11223379/

Longland et al., American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2016. PMID: 26817506. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26817506/

Mettler et al., Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 2010. PMID: 19927027. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19927027/

Pickart et al., Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity, 2012. PMID: 22666519. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22666519/